Remembering Freedom Summer

On the 50th Anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, two long time activists and authors share stories from the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement. Join us for a conversation with Charles E. Cobb, Jr. and Rodney L. Hurst

Charles E. Cobb, Jr. is a former National Geographic magazine staff writer and a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and has also served as a Visiting Professor in Brown University’s Department of Africana Studies. Now living in Jacksonville, Florida, Cobb is a veteran journalist, an inductee of the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame, and his reporting has won multiple awards. In his newly released book, THIS NONVIOLENT STUFF’LL GET YOU KILLED: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, Cobb reveals how nonviolent activists and their allies kept the civil rights movement alive by bearing—and, when necessary, using—firearms.

Rodney L. Hurst joined the Jacksonville Youth Council of the NAACP at age eleven and has been an activist for equality and accountability ever since.Hurst’s book, It was never about a hot dog and a Coke, released in January, 2008, is subtitled “A Personal Account of the 1960 Sit-in Demonstrations in Jacksonville, Florida and Ax Handle Saturday” and recounts the events leading up to and the fallout from the bloody events of August 27, 1960. In the following years Jacksonville’s young freedom fighters were part of a tidal wave of protest and unrest that swept throughout the south, resulting in the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

Bring your own Brown Bag or purchase lunch on site from Cravingz food truck